


This Man is Dead, Jim

by flitterflutterfly



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Bone's POV, M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-15
Updated: 2013-02-15
Packaged: 2017-11-29 10:08:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/685757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flitterflutterfly/pseuds/flitterflutterfly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leonard McCoy knew by the end of the first month of knowing James T. Kirk that he was going to get his heart broken, again. But he also knew that Jim’s happiness was worth more than a dying man. All he had to do, was let him go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Man is Dead, Jim

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Этот человек мертв, Джим](https://archiveofourown.org/works/833142) by [Amorph](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amorph/pseuds/Amorph)



> This story was translated into Russian! How cool is that?

When Leonard McCoy first met James T. Kirk on the shuttle to the school he dreaded, he knew he had found himself a drinking partner, and perhaps even a friend.

“Hey, Bones,” Kirk said after the pilot announced their near arrival. “We should room together.”

Leonard blinked at that. Bones? He questioned himself. “Look, Kirk—”

“It’s Jim,” Kirk cut him off, and then he grinned. “Come on, old man. You’re the only person I’ll know, I assume I’m the only person you’ll know, and you have a fine taste in whiskey.”

Leonard glanced at his empty flask and winced. “Sure, kid,” he sighed. “Why not?”

And so it had started. Leonard found himself becoming fast friends with Kirk, or rather Jim, he reminded himself. Despite the kid’s nearly ADHD personality, he was a neat freak and remarkably intelligent. Both of which suited Leonard just fine. Jim picked up his dirty laundry, he cooked them dinner, and they both engaged in deep conversations about relative physics and politics alike.

Leonard knew he was getting to close to the kid, too fast. But, being the doctor that he was, he ignored his own symptoms and attempted to make his way through Space School Hell.

That, of course, changed the night Leonard got back too late and found Jim thrashing in his bed, in apparent distress. Leonard dropped his bag and rushed over to him, restraining him with one arm and a leg while his free hand ripped the kid’s shirt off of his chest. He had told the kid that wearing tight shirts to bed wasn’t a good idea, the body liked to breath well in sleep. He doubted, however, that Jim’s shirt was the reason for his apparent seizure.

He was proven right when Jim’s fist connected with his jaw and sent him sprawling backwards off the bed. Leonard rubbed his skin, knowing it would leave a bad bruise even as he was still recovering from the shock of the move.

Jim’s eyes were open, his normal blue irises dark. He panted heavily, sweat dripping from his hairline to his bare chest.

Leonard’s eyes followed the drops as they found their path across canyons of scars.

“Jesus, Jim,” Leonard whispered, his hand coming from his chin to reach out to his friend. He took a single step forward.

Jim flinched back and Leonard stopped in place.

“Bones,” Jim’s voice was quieter than Leonard had ever heard. “Please, Bones.”

Leonard wasn’t sure what the kid was asking for, so he settled for dropping his hand to his side and swallowing hard. “Jim, what,” he paused. “Who?” He asked finally.

Jim only just then seemed to notice his state of undress. His eyes widened, and for a moment Leonard thought he saw something in them. Anger. Guilt. Fear. What did James Kirk have to fear?

Then Jim turned his head away, hands gripping his blanket. “I lived on Tarsus IV,” he said quickly, suddenly. His head flipped as he said it, as if he hadn’t expected that to come out of his own mouth.

Leonard stumbled back and found a chair to fall in. He wasn’t sure why he was so surprised. He’d seen Tarsus IV survivors before. Why was this any different?

Because it’s Jim, his mind whispered to him.

Jim’s eyes were still dark, but he gave an easy smile. “Look Bones, sorry for waking you. It was just a nightmare, I get ‘em occasionally. No need to worry.”

“Jim—”

Jim slid back under his covers and pulled them up to his chin. “I got a test tomorrow, gonna get some sleep. Night, Bones.”

And before Leonard could react farther, Jim’s eyes were closed and his breathing deep. Leonard was sure he was faking it, he had to be, but he wasn’t in the right mindset to have this conversation, so he let it be.

After all, it was a shock when the diagnosis comes back positive. It was the only test he could run, and the one he least wanted to learn the answer to.

He, Leonard McCoy, was in love with James Tiberius Kirk.

Goddamnit.

The next morning, Jim didn’t mention anything and Leonard was soon swept away by demonstrations and lectures. He pushed Jim’s scars to the back of his mind, but he never forgot them.

It was half way through their first year together, when Jim invited a girl to their dorm. Leonard found that out only because the girl bumped into him on the way out. He ignored her, and Jim’s satisfied smirk as he got to dinner. He didn’t want to think about it.

It would have been okay, if it had just been girls. Then Leonard could tell himself that Jim was straight, and that he didn’t have a chance in hell with the kid. While homosexuality became a complete accepted part of society around the time when Earth found out about other lifeforms, there were still plenty of guys and girls who only found their pleasures in the opposite sex.

But Jim invited just as many guys as girls. They were always big guys, strong guys. Leonard knew after Charles, the three hundred pounds of muscle that barely had an intelligent cell in his whole body, that Jim liked to be dominated. That didn’t explain the girls, but Leonard just chalked that up as one of Jim’s many contradictions and left it at that.

It took only two months of a constant stream of bed partners before Leonard knew he had to say something, anything.

So he did, right in the middle of one of Jim’s rant on that girl Uhura that still hadn’t told him her first name. Leonard knew it, of course, but she had made him promise not to tell. Leonard didn’t tell, not because of the promise, but because he didn’t want Jim getting any more obsessed with her than he was already. She was attractive, and intelligent, and that was already much more than any of the kid’s usual bed partners.

“And so today, I bumped into her at the—”

“Do any of them ask?” Leonard said, loudly.

Jim looked suitably confused. “What?” He asked, eyebrows furrowed. “Any who? Ask what?”

“Those fuckers that warm your bed,” Leonard couldn’t help himself from growling out. “Do any of them ask where the scars are from?”

Jim’s eyes were darkening and his shoulder’s tensed. Leonard waited for him to answer, his own eyes challenging. Jim’s dropped first. “No,” he said softly. “They never ask.”

Leonard snorted. “They are fucking bastards then,” he said decisively.

Jim sighed. “I wouldn’t have told them if they had,” he admitted. “No one knows, but my brother, my mom, and you.”

Leonard couldn’t stop the warm feeling that spread through him at that. It gave him hope, and he began to smile, a genuine smile.

But then Jim looked at him with large, sad eyes, and his smile fell. “Jim?” he asked, hesitant.

“You’re my best friend, Bones,” Jim’s tone was heartbreaking. “Please.”

It was then that Leonard knew what that ‘please’ meant. His heart dropped and his throat close up.

But Jim was worth more than the same bullcrap reaction he gave Jocelyn when she asked for a divorce.

“Yeah, Jim,” Leonard told him, once he was sure he could speak again. “I’m here for you.”

Jim smiled, a small smile that Leonard couldn’t understand.

“Thanks, Bones,” he said.

After that, Jim never invited anyone to their dorm. Leonard knew that he slept with them elsewhere, but the gesture warmed his bleeding heart anyways.

Leonard had no choice, then, but to become Jim’s best friend. In everything. He was supportive, witty, occasionally sarcastic, and always there for him. He woke immediately to all of Jim’s nightmares, but after the first couple of failed attempts at calming the kid, he found himself staring at the ceiling as Jim thrashed and occasionally even screamed into the dark.

With each chocked back sob that he heard, Leonard felt his death just a little bit closer.

Then, Jim was called up for cheating on the Kobyashi Maru and the man Leonard would later know as Spock stood across from him at the podium.

Leonard didn’t know then just who Spock was going to be for Jim. He wondered if he would have stopped it even if he had known.

But Leonard didn’t have much time for contemplation when he snuck Jim onboard the Enterprise because, as much as he told Jim that he owed him for it, he knew he wouldn’t survive long without the man’s presence.

He realized just how accurate that metaphor was when the kid saved them all from certain death at the hands of the sadistic Romulan, Nero.

But Jim and Spock were arguing. Leonard just stood and watched as Spock ordered Jim to be thrown out of the ship, because he couldn’t react. Because he had seen the way that Jim’s eyes lit up as he spat verbal garbage at the Vulcan. Because he knew that the kid’s eyes had never done that for him.

And then Jim was gone and the hobgoblin was thanking him, and Leonard just exploded because he honestly didn’t know what to do.

He knew then that he was dying. Dying because of his best friend. Dying because of Jim.

Before he could he calm his racing heart, Jim was back with a Scottish engineer of questionable background and a new theory that blew his mind. And then Spock was attacking Jim and Leonard could only gape as his best friend was being strangled in front of his eyes.

He couldn’t sleep without drugs for a month because of that image. Jim struggling for breath, but with eyes brighter than Leonard had ever seen.

Because Spock was touching him.

Then Jim and the hobgoblin were working together like clockwork and the Romulan ship was destroyed and Jim was getting an award and Leonard didn’t have time to think.

And as Spock stepped onboard and raised an eyebrow at Jim, who was now their official captain, Leonard closed his eyes. Because Jim never smiled like that at him.

Only three weeks into their five year mission, Jim came to Bone’s office to announce that he was in love and he didn’t know what to do.

Leonard felt the last bandage on his heart peel off, exposing the raw and still bleeding appendage to the storm of his inner emotions. He just shook his head and offered the kid a drink.

Sometimes he forgot how perceptive his captain really was, cause he couldn’t help but feel a pang of guilt as Jim’s eyes expressed his pain. “I’m sorry, Bones,” the kid whispered.

He left Leonard’s office without another word.

One month later, Leonard saw Spock brush his hand against Jim’s. But Jim’s eyes were only their normal color and Leonard knew the kid didn’t have any idea what it meant.

He sent several files of Vulcan customs to Jim anonymously, and then proceeded to drink himself into a blind stupor for the rest of the night.

When Jim announced their relationship to him, his eyes so blue that Leonard couldn’t stand to look at them, Leonard forced himself to say congratulations.

Leonard thought that was the hardest thing he ever had to do in his life.

That was before Jim asked him to be his best man at his wedding ceremony.

Leonard had to physically restrain himself from getting drunk before it started.

He couldn’t remember what he said for his speech, but it must have been fine because Jim was laughing and even Spock gave him a smile.

Leonard didn’t leave his room for three straight days.

After two years of Jim’s obvious contentment, Leonard still couldn’t bare to fuck even the sexiest of aliens.

He just did his job, but every time he told Jim that another one of his men was dead, he was tempted to scream. Scream, “This man is dead, Jim! I’m dead! Why can’t you see that?”

But he never did.

Because Jim and his hobgoblin of a boyfriend where absou-fucking-lutely perfect for each other.

Spock was healing those scars that he never could.

When Jim asked him if he would ever be able to give Spock a full Vulcan bond, Leonard just showed him the research, anything he could find.

Because, he reflected as he watched Jim and Spock grow closer together, he loved the kid and nothing was worse than thinking he might have stopped the man’s happiness.

Most men said they would die for their captain.

Leonard already had.

But the bright light in Jim’s eyes was worth even that.


End file.
